Herein web-browsing is defined as finding information documents or web-pages on the Internet associated with a given technical or other such criteria of interest to the user. The primary mechanism to search for specific web-pages is to key in search strings of characters to a search engine or the equivalent in a commercially available browser. The searching provides a list of hits or matches, and the specific text or web-pages can be displayed. Any of the listed web pages can be brought up on the screen by known methods, e.g. "pointing and clicking" on words that are "linked" (hypertext links) to classes of information desired and bringing up those web pages on the user's screen if desired or at least bring up the text on the user's screen if graphics are not available to the user. Such web-browsing can be done in general areas or in specific topical areas. The topical areas, herein defined as micro-domains, are usually areas, like the weather, stocks, sports, finance, news, etc., in which specific search protocols with particular search requirements and formats have been developed.
Herein search facilities is defined broadly including any searching mechanism useful on the Internet. Included are specific search engines, such as AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, and search capabilities buried within other databases on other Internet sites.
There has been some disclosure of systems accepting voiced inputs from which searches are made. One such system, called "Galaxy", was developed as a "natural language" system at MIT. This system is an independent browser that is not useful with the existing browsers on the market. This is a limitation since a significant amount of work must be accomplished to allow "Galaxy" to perform searches outside some specific domains for which "Galaxy" has been specifically programmed to understand.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a voice to text search string suitable for inputting into any of the commercially available search engines or databases available on the Internet.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide web searches over specific domain names and for general searches.
Another object of the present invention is to identify key words and to identify extraneous words where the key words delivered to the search engine and the extraneous words deleted.
It is another object of the present invention to arrange the key words into search strings formatted for specific domain names.
It is yet another object of the present invention to allow search results to be re-run to identify links.